Do you find yourself wondering, “Is anyone really visiting my website?” Like any good marketing effort, it is essential to understand who is seeing your message and what their response is. On a website, we can find much of this information by taking a quick look at the site statistics. You will find a bunch of statistics to explain what is happening on your website. Here is a quick cheat sheet to help you understand what the numbers really mean:
Unique Visits is a count that represents a unique person visiting on your site.
Total Pages represents the number of pages visited. Total Pages divided by Unique Visits will show how many pages each visitor views.
Note: Don’t get distracted with the number of Hits to your website. Hits are a count of all requests to your website, including images, HTML files, etc. One visitor to your website could represent 30 or more hits.
Entry & Exit Pages indicate where people start & end a visit to your website. Does everyone ‘quit’ on a certain page? Are lots of people missing the home page? One of our clients has 40% of their visitors entering the website on pages other than the home page. Important information on the home page may be missed.
Referring Site shows the URL of another site where a user clicked a link to your site. This is great information to understand how people find your website.
Browser Report will indicate what type of web browser your client is using (e.g. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape or Safari).
Search Word Report will indicate the most common words typed into a search engine that resulted in your site being found.
HTTP Error Codes: These are the errors returned from your site to users. Most commonly this will be a 404 – File Not Found error. This is usually caused by a link on your site that has been moved, changed or is somehow incorrect.
It takes some effort, but spending some time in your statistics will help you get the most out of your website and is a great way to gauge the response to your online efforts.
By Chris Cotten, Technician for Equine-Design.com
Copyright © 2009 The NW Horse Source, LLC
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